


to accept and to forbear

by kinnoth



Series: nothing clean about what you've done [3]
Category: Band of Brothers, The Pacific - Fandom
Genre: Friendship, Gen, M/M, bonding over shitty boyfriends, heeeeey homophobia, not being coy about the pairings just precautious in case i don't get there
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-15
Updated: 2014-11-18
Packaged: 2017-12-30 17:42:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1021525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinnoth/pseuds/kinnoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roe picks up a stray. Snafu makes a friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shares universes with [friends who share your past](http://archiveofourown.org/works/733362) without sharing all the details.
> 
> If I finish this (which I plan to, but you never know), it's gonna be at LEAST 30k because fuck this shit

This is not the Army. This is neither Bastogne nor Nuenen nor even Camp Toccoa. There is no more "doc"; there is no more "medic". His hands are free from blood and expectation. He is Eugene Roe and only Eugene Roe: he wears no cross and carries no pack. He has no obligations and he is beholden to no creed. He no longer flinches towards screams of his name.

He has a job. He has a rent. He has a schedule. He has a bed he wants to crawl into after his ten-hour shift. 

So he only stops at the mouth of the alleyway because it was either that or trip over the two men barreling out of it. But one shouts to the other, "Come on, let's fucking go!" and his friend responds, "Fucking bastard broke my arm", and Roe did not survive three years of war, did not fight three years against death without learning to seek out violence, to search out the victims of it.

"You fucking shits, I’ll fucking murder you," comes a hoarse reply, followed by the terrible child of a moan and a gurgle. Roe turns towards it, because he's not "doc" anymore, and he's got no obligation, but it will take more than the end of a war and a discharge from service to kill the well-earned, long-acquired instinct to help. 

The man there is a crumple of scraped skin and messy limbs, splayed out upon the pavement. Late afternoon light lashes over the edge of the alley wall, paints half his face orange, casts the other half in shadow. He glares up at Roe with mongrel lips and bloody teeth. "The fuck you looking at?" he asks. 

Roe keeps his eyes down and gets to his knees, drags the man up to sitting against the wall. "Where'd they get you?" he asks. One of the man's eyes is beginning to droop beneath its bruised lid. He has blood on his face, dribbling from his nose, his split lip. It's smeared black on his shirt, beneath his jacket, and when Roe moves his arm to peel it from his side, the man curses and spits.

Knife wound along the ribs, can't tell how deep, can't tell if it's a puncture. The man twists out of Roe's grip with increasing vehemence every time he tries to look. 

"Calm down, goddamnit, let me see," he says. The patterns are easy -- the words, the assurances -- mindlessly familiar. Roe pushes his palm into the man's chest, pins him back; the man's dogtags click together in snaps of sound beneath his fingers. “Did you hit your head?” Roe lifts a hand to the man's brow, ready to check his pupils.

"The fuck are you? Get off me," the man snarls, and Roe narrowly avoids an elbow to the face. 

Roe holds up his hands and sits back on his heels. He's got blood on one palm, crusting along the backs of his knuckles on the other. He hasn't had another man's blood on his hands since the war. It dries stickily in the lingering heat of the day. Roe breathes out once, hard. He's forgotten himself. He glances down. "You Navy?"

The man presses a hand into his side and draws his body into itself. Pulls back his lip and demands, "What's it to you?"

"Nothing, just," Roe assures him, "I was Army. Airborne. Medical technician. I was at Normandy," he adds impulsively.

"Yeah?" The man's bruised mouth sneers, his bayou accent drawing out thicker with every syllable. "You and every other asshole in the goddamn country. Guess the Nazis weren't so tough after all, if this many of you fuckers made it back."

"Yeah," Roe agrees, watching the man's fingers grip, slowly run over with his own blood, "but I ain't the one who got jumped in an alley by two bar-room byblows who probably didn't even make the draft." The man bares his teeth outright. Roe smiles his most symmetrical smile. "Didn't the Navy teach you how to fight, boy?"

"Hey, fuck you." The man pushes to his feet, and Roe stands to match him. He looks as if he might make it, until he tries to square his shoulders, shift onto his toes, make for a swing, and Roe knows what it looks like when a man oversteps his own body, knows where to move and how to catch a man whose own limits take him by surprise.

He takes the man's weight onto his shoulder and shuffles him back down again on the ground. "Let me help you," Roe says impatiently. 

The man jerks away from him again. "I said, get the fuck off me."

"You gonna bleed out, you know that," Roe insists, and the man seems to consider this. A shutter of confusion passes over his face, and Roe knows that look, seen it enough times on the faces of guys who needed reminding to be afraid of death. They tended to die quick and nasty. Roe wonders how the war missed this one.

"Put your hand here," Roe tells him anyway, tries to shift the man's hold on his ribs to just slightly above, just so he can see. Roe keeps his eyes down, avoids his stare, knows this is the sort of man who would read an allegation of weakness in a look of concern. 

"Hold this -- stop it." The man's hand slides down again, hiding, and in his peripheral vision, Roe has yet to see him blink. He snaps, "Goddamnit, Sledge, would you hold the fuck still while I make you not die?"

The man jerks. "My name's not Sledge." His fingers stumble to shove his tags under his shirt. He shifts as if he might move to stand again.

Roe keeps him down. He isn't going to argue this: Roe might not have what one might call an abundance of education, but he can read, and he reads Sledge's goddamn name hanging around his neck. "What's your name then?" he asks indulgently.

The man pauses. "Shelton," he answers.

"All right, Shelton," Roe agrees. "Nice to meet you."

Shelton's moved his hand away, and Roe can see beneath it now. Four inch incision, cut clean, clotting slowly. Doesn't seem to have hit bone, but the sunlight's dying, and Roe can't be sure. 

"And I wasn't fucking Navy."

"Ain't that swell." Roe digs into his pocket, pulls out a handkerchief and shakes it, as if that might make it cleaner. He pushes it into Shelton's hand. "Here. Hold this. Keep the pressure on."

Shelton does as he's told, and catches Roe's eye, drags up his gaze until he's looking him in the face. Circles under his eyes, lines between his brows -- Shelton isn't young. If Roe isn't young, then Shelton isn't either, but he sounds much younger than he ought to when he asks, "Am I gonna bleed out?"

Roe looks away and searches his pockets. He doesn't have anything else he can use -- this isn't the Army, and he's no medic anymore. He has no obligation. Still, he tells him, "No, you're gonna live." Glances up, adds, because this isn't the Army anymore, "You'd live longer, if you'd stop fighting me."

Shelton blinks and looks away. "Sorry," he mumbles.

Roe snorts. "You'll need stitches." He pulls Shelton to his feet, but he tilts as if he can't quite keep the ground underneath him -- he did hit his head then, cos he hasn't lost enough blood for vertigo. Roe slings his left arm over his shoulder, because Shelton needs his right to press down on his wound. He's smaller than Roe is, and slack with fatigue. It's an awkward arrangement, when Roe is also being careful not to jostle him. Half-wrapped around him like this, Shelton smells like blood and sweat and unwashedness. His sour breath hits the side of Roe's face when he breathes. 

"There's a hospital, couple miles north of here," Roe tells him. "I can call--"

"I ain't got no money for no hospital." Fury cuts abruptly through the pain that had been cottoning Shelton's voice. Roe pauses their shuffle, surprised.

"That's not --"

"Fuckers jumped me for my prize money. Took me for everything. I ain't got jack shit but the shirt on my back." And Roe suddenly puts it together: the multitude of tiny cuts across Shelton's hands, the bruises down his arm, the battered knuckles. Amateur boxing -- bare-knuckled and unlicensed, probably. He's in the right neighborhood for it -- probably knocks heads right next to a dogfighting pit. 

"Can't you do it?" Shelton demands.

"I'm not a doctor," Roe points out evenly. The streets are empty, so early into evening. Cooking wafts down from the upper story apartments. The streetlights have yet to flicker on.

"Yeah?" Shelton sneers, but then pulls in on the corners until it crooks into some species of a smile. "You sure act like one."

"I was a field medic," Roe reminds him. "That ain't the same thing."

Shelton's eyes narrow in his ugly face. "You said you'd help me," he accuses petulantly. 

Shelton is not a friend. He is not a squadmate and Roe has no duty towards him. He's another soldier who's lost his place -- one in a thousand, a hundred thousand -- and who'd tripped into hard times trying to find it. But Roe hesitates before taking them another dragging step forward, and Shelton stumbles, keeps to his feet, but breathes out hard, once, in real pain. 

"We can go to my place," Roe says.

"Great."

"It's not close," Roe warns.

"Sure thing."

"I haven't got any medical supplies," Roe tells him, desperately, because he's not prepared for this, he really, really isn't. 

"I appreciate it." Shelton staggers into him, and Roe catches him up. He grins, and Roe can see, maybe, momentarily, how it might be to have this man's trust, to be this man's friend. It's not something he dwells on.

It takes half an hour to get to Roe's neighborhood, the sun setting dimly over the sky. By the time they get to his building, it's dark, the gaslamps buzz with gnats and moths, and Roe is practically carrying him, dragging Shelton indoors, pushing him up stairs. 

"Hey, Doc,” Shelton murmurs, once Roe's hauled him to the first landing. His pale eyes are trained on Roe's profile, as if it is something to be studied.

"You shouldn't call me that," Roe tells him. He is tired, and so it comes out harsh. He didn't mean it to, so he amends, softer, "I'm not a doctor."

Shelton looks away; offended or embarrassed, his slack face isn't telling. "'s just a nickname," he drawls, his voice easy and unconcerned. "It don't have to mean anything." 

Roe grunts, saves his breath. The second floor landing has never looked so far away.

"Well fine, then," Shelton says, after a moment with an air of peevish charity. "What is your name?"

"Roe,” Roe tells him, heaving breaths, resting for a moment against the railing. “Eugene Roe."

Shelton chuckles, eyes lowered, and his body vibrates with whatever private joke he's caught in. "Eugene Roe,” he pronounces. “Huh." His head lolls back, almost touching Roe's arm as he gazes out under heavy lids and remarks, "You know, I've known a few Eugenes in my time."

"It's a common enough name," Roe replies between grit teeth. Shelton's not big, but he weighs as much as a house. Six more steps, and then Roe can set him down. 

Shelton continues, as if he hasn't heard, "All good ones though. Only the very best get to be called Eugene. You a good one, Eugene Roe?"

Roe would've thought him drunk, or at least happily intoxicated, but for the fact that he suspects Shelton is actually trying not to let on just how hard he hit his head. "I try to be," he replies indifferently.

Shelton laughs. It's a low, full-shouldered sound, and it shakes them both. "Can't rightly ask for more than that, now can we?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no points for pointing out that line i lifted directly from "tinker tailor soldier spy"


	2. Chapter 2

Roe leans Shelton up against the peeling yellow paint in the walkway to his room, one hand braced against his shoulder while he searches his pockets for his key. 

Shelton's head lolls against the wall, over his shoulder and then hangs, chin to his chest. He chuckles, "Golly, Doc, no need to be rough. All you gotta do is ask."

"Shut up," Roe mutters, mostly ignoring him. His face has spouted a fine layer of sweat, his hair sticking to his skin. His goddamn key he finds in his breast pocket – always the last place he looks – and he manages to scrape it into the lock and wedge open the catch when he hears a door opening at the end of the hall. 

"Gene?" a voice asks, friable as dried flowers. "Is that you, Gene?"

Roe winces into the empty space in front of him but smooths it evenly enough into a smile that it passes. "Good evening, Mrs. Duchamp," he says, all sweetness and light. "Please excuse me a moment." He kicks open the door and shovels Shelton and his excessive number of limbs into the room ahead of him, dumps him in a chair. 

He has to take his hands off Shelton for a moment to find the light switch, but then he's right back where he started, setting him rightside up when he tries to slide off onto the floor. "Wait here," he instructs, palms firmly planting. "Don't move."

Shelton mumbles something undoubtedly cutting that Roe mostly misses in his hurry out the door.

Mrs. Duchamp is still standing in her doorway, the chain still in its latch. She looks up at him suspiciously as he jogs over to assuage her. "Who's that man you've got with you, there, Gene?" she demands, squinting through her cokebottle glasses.

Roe shifts, just a bit, as if he could block her view of Shelton's existence more completely than her cataracts and a firmly shut door. "He's just a friend, ma'am," he assures lightly.

His landlady squints. "He looks like a drunk."

Roe smiles his best _such a nice boy_ smile. "He's just a bit tired, that's all."

Mrs. Duchamp steps to the side to glower over his shoulder. Roe steps with her. She scowls up at him. "Well, make sure he doesn't make a mess," she snaps, grudgingly. "I don't like strangers in the building"

"Of course not, Mrs. Duchamp." Keeps smiling.

Mrs. Duchamp squints at him a moment more. "All right," she concedes. She makes to close her door. 

Roe rushes forward. "Actually, ma'am," he says, his toe suddenly jammed in between the door and the frame. He's struck by the smell of rosewater and cats. Mrs. Duchamp looks bewildered. Roe ducks his head as if embarrassed. "I was wondering if I could borrow your sewing kit."

Mrs. Duchamp steps back distrustfully. "Why, what do you want it for?"

"Just a button," Roe tells her, his face rigid as rictus. "It's come off."

Her penciled eyebrows go up into her hairline. "And you want to sew it," she says slowly, "back on?"

Antipathy heats the sides of his face. "Yes, ma'am."

His landlady screws a look at him. "Ain't you got a girl somewhere who can do this for you?"

Roe's expression takes an edge, but it stays recognizable. "No, ma'am."

Mrs. Duchamp assesses him skeptically but eventually shuffles back into her own apartment, leaving him at the door. There's a fumbling sound, as a drawer being opened and rooted through. She reappears a couple moments later holding a paneled ivory box. "I want this back," she says, holding it just barely through the gap of the door.

Roe reaches in and grasps it. "Of course, Mrs. Duchamp."

"Tonight." She doesn't let go. 

Roe tugs, gentle, but with a consistent effort. "I'll have it straight back, Mrs. Duchamp."

Her crooked knuckles give. Roe nearly drops the box as it tumbles into his arms. Its contents rattle mutedly as it hits his chest. "Thank you, Mrs. Duchamp," he says.

Roe takes his leave with a precise wave and shuttles promptly down the hall. Just as he's about to enter his own room, Mrs. Duchamp calls from hers, "If that fella's staying with you, it'll be another fifteen cents a day." Roe pauses with a hand on his doorknob. "I ain't running no goddamn poor house, you know." Her door slams shut. Roe bends his head. He bites at the inside of his mouth and breathes.

Inside his room, Shelton's sprawled himself over the hardbacked chair somehow like he's got liquid for bones. His eyes rake over Roe's bare walls as if he has half the mind to proposition one of them. "Nice place you got here," he says in that slow voice of his.

Roe pays him no mind. He sets the sewing kit next to Shelton's elbow on the kitchen table and ducks down to look through his cabinets. He sets a pan of water on the boil and cleans his hands, trying to scrub out the stains beneath his nails. He comes back with booze, a wet kitchen cloth, and an old first aid kit the previous tenant had left under the sink. "Lift up your arm," he says, ignoring Shelton's dragging gaze. "Take off your shirt and try not tear off the clot."

"Nice ceilings, light fixtures, carpet," Shelton continues, undiscouraged. "Hell," he says, as Roe kneels in front of him. "I bet you even got your own bathroom." Shelton raises his arm when Roe prompts him to, shrugs out of his jacket and shuffles his shoulders diffidently to wiggle out of his A-shirt. Roe focuses on prying the handkerchief from his side. Shelton's skin is a roadmap of scars, old and new, dark on his dark skin. Roe can't be sure how many are combat wounds. His dogtags swing and click over his chest.

Roe glances at Shelton, finds him staring back with inscrutable eyes. He blinks back down and Shelton raises a slow hand, twists his fingers into the chain and throws it over his shoulder out of the way.

Roe keeps his nose out of Shelton's business, concentrates instead on peeling his palm off the sticky handkerchief now crusted to his skin. Scabs have already started forming; they peel off in clumps and begin to ooze sluggishly. Shelton doesn't seem to notice. He gestures his chin at Roe's corner of paper clippings, continues as if he hadn't missed a beat, "Decorating could use a bit of work though. Newspaper is so pre-war. Gotta get you some glossies. At least upgrade you to the funny pages."

Roe dabs at his skin. "Leave it," he advises mildly. Shelton goes quiet. Roe feels his eyes on him, assessing, but he keeps to his work. The wound doesn't look quite so serious now that he's sopped up the mess around it. The skin around it is hot and red but the wound itself is clean. It's a neat four inches, no shrapnel or ragged edges, cut between the contours of Shelton's skinny ribs. He's lucky he wasn't stabbed or the knife'd gone straight through. Roe hands Shelton the rag after he's done with the implicit understanding that he should clean his hands. 

"I'm going to need to disinfect this," Roe tells him in clear, firm syllables. He picks a cotton pad from the first aid kit and wets it with alcohol. "This is going to sting."

"Not that there's anything wrong with newspaper," Shelton resumes like an amendment but without a hint of apology. He wipes the gore from his fingers with only perfunctory interest, still watching, studying. "A good paper'll last me a whole day, hell, I'll go a whole week if the words are small enough."

Roe sits back on his heels, eyebrows raised in mild arches of saintly tolerance. "Shelton." 

"Doc," Shelton acknowledges, pale eyes narrowed like in challenge.

Lets it go, holds a bottle up to Shelton's face. "Drink this." Shelton takes it and downs it without remark.

He pulls a face after half the bottle's gone down his gullet. "This tastes like shit. Ain't you got anything else?"

Roe stops swabbing his wound and holds up the cotton swab demonstratively. "I'm using the whisky as antiseptic."

Shelton shrugs with his mouth. "Fair enough." The lip of the bottle goes back between his teeth where he chews on it inattentively.

Shelton's got a mouth on him, that's for sure. Roe finishes on his own damn time, welcoming the quiet. It lasts nearly three minutes, til Shelton blurts out, "You gotta use pink?"

Roe snorts and tosses the spool of pale pink silk carelessly back into the kit. Mrs. Duchamp would not be happy. "Well, all right," he answers back, "what color would _you_ like for your knife wound, little boy?" He turns the box showily like he's presenting a prize. 

Shelton leers, pleased with himself. Says around the bottle lip, "Always been partial to a nice, fire-engine red myself." 

"Red it is," Roe affirms, and pulls out the red silk instead. He digs through the sewing kit for a needle but, rolling it between his fingertips, wonders how he's going to suture a concave curve with a straight bar.

"Hold on," he mutters, and sticks the needle back into the pincushion with the others. He leaves Shelton sitting in the kitchen while he disappears into the back room. Under his bed, he's got a spare toolbox that used to be his pa's tacklebox. Still has some of his gear at the bottom, he finds.

"Is that a fishhook?" Shelton asks when he comes back. 

Roe holds the thin, silver hook into the light and tries to thread a length of silk through it. He misses. "You didn't want to go to a hospital," Roe reminds him.

Shelton shrugs, mumbling, "Just surprised, is all." He takes short swigs from the bottle; out of habit probably, it can't be for the taste. "You don't look much like the fishing type."

"Yeah?" He threads the eye on the third try. The water on the stove has started to bubble, so he goes over to it and drops the needle in. "How do you figure that?" 

Shelton hums sagely, "You ain't got the hands for it."

"I fish as well as the next man," Roe protests, watching the hook and thread float about the pan.

"Nah," Shelton baas. His head lolls back until he's looking over at Roe through crescentic eyes. "You ain't got the hands of a _travailleur_."

" _On dit que j’aie les mains d’un couac-soleil?_ " Roe takes the pan off the fire and runs it under the sink until the water's cold enough to touch. He fishes out the hook by the string. 

Shelton rights himself, slowly. " _Non...._ " he pronounces, " _juste comme un …...poète_."

Roe lets out a soundless breath of a laugh. "You're in no danger of that, I promise."

Shelton grimaces sheepishly. "I forget the word for, you know." He raps the side of his head with his knuckles. "Egghead."

" _La tête_?" Roe suggests, struggling to conceal his smile with the angle of his face.

"N....yes," Shelton answers. Smiles blithely. "La tit."

A snicker stumbles up over Roe's lips, breath hissing between his teeth, and he brings the back of his wrist up to block his grinning mouth. 

Shelton's smirk evens out reluctantly. His chuckle starts low but rises in ferocity until it becomes laughter, honking and loud. It's a god-awful sound. Roe laughs harder, tries harder to hide it.

The moment of levity cuts short when Shelton's quavering flank starts to ooze. "Oh, shit," he says, still giggling. Roe grabs the cloth from his hands and reapplies it over the wound. He's torn his scabs.

"I gotta close this up," Roe tells him, pressing down with his palms and on the corners of his mouth. "This is going to hurt."

Shelton nods. "That's okay, Doc."

Roe corrects him, "I'm not a doctor." It's without any real heat, more reflex now than indignation. 

Shelton smiles blandly. The expression is almost congenial. "All right," he agrees.

Roe puts his fingertips up against the sides of the wound to brace the needle and pushes into the first layer of flesh. Shelton startles but makes no noise. Roe tugs the thread through with one smooth gesture. "So you were Marines," he says solicitously.

"No better friend, no worse enemy," Shelton replies with constructed cheer. He's gone back to studying the walls, eyes roving, counting Roe's bare cupboards and watching the gnats circle around the kitchen light.

Roe joins the two edges of the wound together, pulls it tight. "I've got a cousin, went to the Marines," he mentions.

Shelton's gaze flickers down to him once. "Ain't that swell." 

Roe hums peaceably. "Ain't heard from him since." He knots off the ends and cuts the string. One. "Probably didn't make it back," he adds, for no reason he can think of other than that this is the only other relevant thing to know about the man.

Shelton's ribcage jerks away this time, when Roe tries to touch it. He's trying; Roe can tell he's trying, but the body knows pain and loathes it. "So where you from?"

"Lafourche." Shelton says it like a hiss. His eyelids flutter and he drinks a long drink from the nearly empty bottle. 

Roe nudges the whisky over to him. As Shelton moves to take it, he pushes into the second stitch. Shelton twitches. "Talk to me, man. It'll help," Roe coaxes. He's a stranger creature disappeared into himself like this than he is running his mouth a mile a minute, distant and unfocused as faraway geography. Roe doesn't prefer it.

Shelton sneers in response, but it's insincere. He takes a drink and emerges with a grimace and, "Where you from?" He sounds absently resentful.

"Bayou Chene. Over in St. Martin." Roe ties off and starts the next one. Two. "But I ain't been back there since '38." Mosquito summers, rain-swollen waterways, dust kicked into the air by the tires of rusty pickups. Oil beneath his nails, oil in his clothes, taste of it in all his food, coating his teeth. "My ma's still there, and my sister's family."

Shelton's gone quiet again, swigging his booze. Roe is surprised above anything else. Surely he's had worse hurts than a few needle pricks. "You got family?" he prompts.

"Sure," Shelton replies, "I got family," and offers no more information.

Roe waits a beat more, in case Shelton decides to expand, but his stare remains fixed, flat as mirrors. "That's good," he concludes. Starts the next stitch. "Where do you work?"

Shelton drinks, and another finger of whisky disappears down his throat. "They know me in the lumberyards." Roe nods encouragingly. Shelton sees him, looks away, and mumbles, "I go when they're short on hands." 

He shifts in his seat. Roe holds him down til he finishes his stick. Three. "Where you working?" Shelton asks wearily. His voice has gotten lower, longer, and slower since he switched to the whisky. His breaths beneath Roe's hands have gone heavy and deep. 

"Construction," Roe answers with a light tone, working quickly. "They got us putting up houses in the back of town." 

Shelton snorts wetly. "That's funny." He shoves his knuckles over the prominent bone of his brow.

"Why's that?" He lets Shelton distract himself and knots off the fourth stitch. Six more should do it.

Shelton rubs his hand roughly over his face, scratching down his neck and over the back of his head. "Coz," he says forcefully, as if Roe's asked a question with an obvious answer. "We get dropped in on the middle of hell on earth, fight our ways out. Make it back home -- reasonable health, all our bits. And what do we do with that?" Shelton jabs the air with a sloppy finger, fist still curled around the bottle. "Construction."

Roe looks up at him. His hands stop bemusedly in the middle of a stitch. "You expecting some kind of happily ever after?"

Something uncomfortably genuine shutters out of Shelton's expression just as he makes eye contact. "Nah," he remarks in perfect lazy indifference, "just more variety."

Roe wouldn't have pegged Shelton for the reflective type, but then, they've both been wrong with their assumptions. "World's a small place," he says instead.

Shelton smirks and takes another a drink. "Lilliputian," he drawls, swallowing.

Roe huffs. That doesn't even sound like a real word. "What's that?"

Shelton gnaws thoughtfully on the bottle. "It means small, like, real small," he says labouriously. "It's from a book about some guy who visits islands and giants and shit."

Roe's eyebrows go up. "A book?"

"Yeah, a book." Shelton swallows the rest of the bottle then asks accusingly, "What?"

"Nothing." Roe shifts his grip on the hook, going back to stitching. "You just don't look the reading type, that's all."

Shelton nudges him with his knee. "I read."

"Yeah?" 

"Yeah."

"Me too," Roe assures him. "Cereal boxes, soup cans, I read it all."

Shelton snickers and Roe smiles at him amiably. His voice is softer now, his words longer on their vowels. "Nah, it was," Shelton says. Stops, rearranges his face, starts again. "My buddy. I got this friend, you know. Real smart like. Reads all sorts of shit. Stories, textbooks. Poems. He's going to be an ornithologist." He says the last word carefully, every syllable pronounced. 

Roe hums an agreeable pitch and keeps him talking. "How'd you meet him?

"Eh?" Shelton's eyes have gained a pinkish hue in their whites, his face a clumsy ineptitude. Perhaps Roe shouldn't have given him the booze. He has lost quite a bit of blood; he looks about ready to tip over.

He finishes off stitch seven and takes a moment for himself. Stretches out his neck, cracks the stiffness out of his wrist. He repeats more clearly before settling back into it, "How'd the two of you meet?"

"He was." A coil of trouble appears between Shelton's brows. His mouth goes into a moue of disconcertment. "We were in the same mortar squad." 

Roe nods, notes with a glance the distant, slanted gaze that has unfocussed Shelton's heavy eyes. He sneaks in the last two stitches while Shelton's awareness drifts somewhere inwards and far away.

"He," Shelton continues without prompting. His expression goes wistful, then rigid, then blank. Roe looks back down at his work. A familiar line of blood has accumulated in the creases of his fingers.

Then Shelton smiles meanly, shoulder squirming up into a shrug. "That's all I got to say about him."

Roe picks through the first aid kit for a piece of gauze, unrolls two or three inches of it around his fingers. "Sorry," he says, because that's what you say when you can't raise the dead.

"Sorry about what?" Shelton's lazy, sleepy demeanor snaps suddenly into alertness. His eyes go hard and bright as metal. 

Roe pulls his hands from Shelton's flank and raises them into view. He picks up the pads of cotton and tape with careful fingers. "Almost done," he says lowly.

Shelton jerks away this time even though Roe hasn't touched him "You scared of me, Doc?" he demands, leering. "You think I'm some sort of nutcase? Think I'm cracked in the head?"

Roe shrugs innocuously. Meets his stare, holds it without blinking. There is an anger there that Roe has nothing to do with. He can't tell what kind of world Shelton sees when he looks out of those catoptric eyes and Shelton isn't inviting him to know. "I ain't scared of you, Shelton," he says finally.

"Yeah, well you should be." Shelton slams the bottle onto the kitchen table with a force Roe can feel through his knees. 

Roe picks up the bottle and moves it further from the edge of the table where an intemperate elbow might send it crashing to the floor. "And why's that?"

He leans down, mouth full of slick teeth and the stink of cooking sherry. "I am a nutcase." 

Nodding, smoothing down the tape with his fingertips, Roe replies with flat unconcern, "You don't say."

Shelton's eyes narrow. "You don't believe it?" he asks, something like a challenge rising with his voice.

Roe sits back on his heels, surveys his work with a cool eye. No loose ends, not too tight, nothing to catch on a careless motion or gesture. It's neat, more than satisfactory, some might say, even, professional. "I believe you're drunk," he says and goes to scrub Shelton's crap out from under his fingernails.

Over the running water, Shelton insists blurrily, "I could be both."

"You hear voices?" Roe challenges. He turns over his shoulder to look Shelton in the face. "You find yourself in places you don't remember getting to? You feel like everyone's out to get you?"

Roe wouldn't have pegged him for a morose drunk. His eyes are watery, and there's a puffiness to his skinny nose. He looks like he's been hit in the face, which, to be fair, he has. "Not that kinda nutcase, Doc," he says tiredly. "You don't get it. You don't know."

They've all had their lives shattered, their goodness shat upon. Shelton seems to forget that, caught within himself like this. They've both been to war. 

Roe could meet him in this, stand against him, toe to toe, nose to nose, show him just how little difference there is between them. Show him what kind of cruelty he keeps wrapped up under his own skin.

Roe doesn't know what sort of common tragedy, what kind of prosaic guilt Shelton carries with him, what it is he's done that fuels his belligerence and desire to hurt, but he wears it poorly. It sinks his shoulders, makes him shrink, undercutting the stature of his aggression to make him more of what he really is -- small, tattered, a figment of a man. He's a study of marked fractures and open fault lines. Roe could break him without trying. Anyone could.

"Come off the booze first," he says, softly, as so to dampen the harsh rush of pity and hostility that's crawled under his skin. "You can convince me once you sober up."

Shelton sniffs and stumbles to his feet. "I oughta get on home," he mumbles. He tries to get his arm into his shirt, misses, stumbles, crashes into himself and nearly falls. Roe catches him, rights him, doesn't let him. 

"Were do you live?" he challenges, fingers around Shelton's wrists, testing his sluggish pulse.

Shelton shakes him off and gestures in a vague wave of his hand. "I got a place," he says dismissively.

Roe pulls him up, stretches his shirt back over his head for him. "That's what I thought." He sets Shelton on his feet and pushes him ahead, makes sure he doesn't run into any walls as they limp their way over to the back bedroom. He keeps a palm on Shelton's tricep, the other the back of his neck, notes a mark there he hadn't seen before. It's old, a couple months at least, different from the others, round like a mouthful of teeth.

Hauling Shelton over to the bed, dumping him down, dragging off his shoes (more hole than leather; his socks aren't much better). Shelton stops him halfway, drags up his attention with a hand fumbling against his shoulder: "You gonna let me stay?" He sounds genuinely, artlessly confused. 

Roe finishes, pushes Shelton's legs up with the rest of him. "I ain't letting you leave like this," he tells him brusquely. "You'll just get mugged again, and I ain't got any more gauze."

Shelton's sickle eyes blink rapidly three times in succession. "You don't know me, Doc."

This is true and not something Roe hasn't considered, argued with himself for and against a half-dozen times in the three hours of their acquaintance so far. He considers it again when he goes over to the closet, finds an old sheet, and throws it over Shelton's body. Shelton is no one. Roe goes round and round but comes back to that fact. Not a friend, not a duty, not an obligation, barely a human being. He's lascivious and rude and not even very grateful. But he's here now, living and breathing and stinking up Roe's room with every whisky-laced breath. And he wouldn't have been, if Roe hadn't stopped to help him. He wouldn't even be here.

Of the things he's done so far that might turn out badly, this doesn't even come close to being the dumbest. "I know enough," he responds, pulling the blind shut over his dust-streaked window. "Go to sleep. You can keep being a nutcase in the morning."

He nudges Shelton's shoes into a corner and goes back to the kitchen to clean up the mess, put back together his head, re-evaluate the decisions he's made so far in his life. As he closes the door Shelton makes a noise. "Thanks, Gene," Roe thinks he hears, but when he looks back at him to ask him, Shelton's already asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> props to [dear_tiger](http://dear-tiger.livejournal.com) for the beta


	3. Chapter 3

Storms overhead, bursts of light, bright through the treetops. Dirt beneath his hands, cold and wet as snow. Dirt beneath his head, his face turned toward the sky. Weight on his chest, weight on his wrists, weight on all his limbs. Pinned. He's pinned like a rat in a vivisection. He can't feel his breath; he can't feel his blood.

The branches reach over him, black and jagged like cracks in a porcelain sky. Clouds the colour of magnesium, a spinning gyroscope of light and fire. The howls claw into the air. He's known the screams of slaughterhouses, the pitched squeals that comes in waves. This is not that: no bleating, no animal, wordless moan. This is a roar that climbs like a choir. It shivers through the wind in inharmonious wails.

Hot rain patters down on him, splashing into his eyes, the soft edges of his lips. Dissolves onto his tongue, thick like salt. The taste of metal beneath the heat.

Can't see beyond the bloom, can't hear beyond the screams, voices taking form, shapes in the shadows. Hands reaching toward him, fingers on his skin, dragging, pushing, taking.

"Eugene."

Fire soaring through the trees, crackling, the smell of burning meat.

"Eugene, come on, wake up."

Nails biting into his flesh, scratching through the sinews, sinking into his bones.

"Wake up, man, come on, you're dreaming."

Cold in his bones, spreading through his insides. Cold, spreading and he can't stop it. The sky howls.

"Gene."

The trees bend and break. Splinters crashing down. And then the knives fall.

"Sweetheart."

Roe's eyes open on a silent breath. There are hands on his arms, holding him into himself, turning him onto his back and untangling him from the covers. Roe blanks, doesn't try to fight them. His pulse beats thick and sour in his throat. Someone kneeling over him, shadow blocking out the window, eyes pale in the gas light.

It's Shelton, he realizes, coming into himself. Roe remembers now how he'd shoved him out of the middle of the bed, laid down next to him top to tail last night after he'd cleaned up, put away his things, taken Mrs. Duchamp back her precious box of silks. Shelton with his coarse hands and rough manner, touching him like he's something fragile. Roe pushes him off. He levers himself up, appendages still heavy and ungainly with sleep, tries to find some stability in the familiar weight of the blankets pooling into his lap, the feel of his skin folding when he pulls his knees up under himself. Gathering his limbs, he winces as the streetlight hits him square in the face from between the blinds.

Shelton sits back. Something clears from his face, hardens the lines back from those strange, worry-softened curves. The look of honest fear on his face strikes Roe incuriously; God knows what Shelton thought he saw in his sleep-addled, booze-pickled eyes, but whatever it was, it's not here, it's not real.

"What?" Roe asks. His voice sounds clogged and harsh, even to his own ears. His throat hurts. Slowly, he shuts his eyes and opens them again. His lashes stick to each other and separate with audible sounds.

Shelton moves back, his face turned away from the light. "You were having a bad dream," he says tonelessly. His hands lie curled and limp in his lap. "I thought I ought to wake you up."

Roe swallows and hums to test his voice. He leans his forehead down against a knee, closes his eyes. It's dark there, now, blankly empty. "I'm fine." His shoulders dip down. His body feels as barren and heavy as if he had cement in his veins.

He squeezes his eyelids until the black sparks with color and he takes in deliberate swallows of air, tries to find some quiet center of himself in which to exist. But the roomful of stagnant air and the darkness of the pre-morning loom up behind him and settle like a tarp over his shoulders, his head. Everything goes muted and far away, and Roe's tenuous calm slips away from him until there's nothing left but him in the dark. Heat builds behind his eyes and his breath rises into his head. He screws his brows tight and holds. The sour hollowness between his lungs only seems to expand.

"You were shouting," Shelton tells him. Even he sounds further away, more distant, and he's right here: his weight on the mattress; his heat under the blanket; his knee pressing against Roe's shin.

Roe moves his leg away; Shelton's is not a touch he wants, and he'd rather have none at all than one he didn't choose.

He moves his own hand until it's flush with his cheek, smooths it slowly onto his nape and presses viciously at the knot of tension there because it's not enough. He feels low and loathsome for even hoping it might be. "It's nothing," he says evenly. His fingers spasm as the joints buckle under the pressure, and it's pain, but it's not pain of the right sort that might quell his shame. He wants to bite something until it bleeds, but that he can't stand the taste of blood in his mouth. "Just a nightmare." He fists the hair on the back of his head instead. Pulls til it gives. "I'll be fine. Thank you."

Roe lies back down onto his side with no intention of sleep, eyes still closed because that's easier than seeing. He breathes each subsequent moment into existence, trying to will his breath into occupying the whole of his chest cavity. He hugs his sheets into himself, elbows dug into his stomach, gathering in and surreptitiously tries to make himself smaller. He wishes Shelton would just go back to sleep; knows he makes a sight, grown man huddling in the dark at a couple of bad dreams. He knows Shelton's still watching him, feels his eyes assessing, heavy as a physical touch. He hopes Shelton doesn't touch him. He doesn't think he could stand it.

Pressure on his legs, but that's just cloth, Shelton reaching over and adjusting the edge of Roe's blanket so that it covers his feet. He murmurs with something like sympathy, "Looks like we're both a bit nuts, huh, Doc?"

Roe doesn't know what kind of answer to give to that. Shelton shifts on his side of the bed, his weight rocking the mattress. There's a careful inch of space between them that Roe is piteously thankful for.

He listens to Shelton's shuffling as he gets himself comfortable. There's a wet click of a noise, as if he might talk, but that moment passes, silence reigning. A truck drives by through the alley below his window, throwing headlight shadows onto the ceiling.

Then, when Roe least expects it, "My ma used to take me down to Bayou Cane for summers before she left me there for good." Shelton's voice is pitched low, muffled by the angle of his own body. "I'd stay with my nan, and she'd look after me. Used to be I'd get sick every year: shakes, fever. Used to get dreams, too, like," he swallows thickly, "real bad nightmares. Wake up screaming like the devil himself was after me."

Roe listens without really hearing, reluctant to let anything disturb the tenuous sense of numbness he's managed to find.

Shelton shifts again, and the bedsprings creak. "I thought there were monsters in the dark every time I closed my eyes," he continues. "I'd be afraid to go to sleep, so nan'd have to sit up with me. She had this song she used to sing, do you know--" he hums a few quick bars of something hesitant and monotone. Roe shakes his head. It could be anything.

Shelton clears his throat. "Sorry," he coughs. "That was. Um." A pause. "It's got words too, it's--

" _Galine, galine, galine, galo_ ," he croaks. Still doesn't sound like much. " _Galine, galine, galine, galo._ " Shelton singing gains some music as he goes. His voice is hoarse but surprisingly mild, plain but soft. " _Galine galine, galo. Galine galine, galo._ "

It's a sad, slow sound that rises up like a question and falls again in answer. Roe can see how it might've comforted a child's fear of the night. The words don't mean anything to him, and the melody would have sounded better on a woman's voice, but he lets Shelton's song wash over him like a long, trailing wave. It takes up the expanse in the room better than his physical body, steeping into dark corners, filling up the space. It's not much, and it's not easy, but his next breath comes without force. His hands release their clenched grip.

Between the listing back and forth of Shelton's voice, Roe sleeps and does not dream.

 

When Roe wakes next, Shelton's gone. It's morning, pale grey sunshine glowing through the blinds. A milk truck rumbles by and a newsboy wanders down the street below, calling out the day's headlines.

He unfolds himself carefully; his joints ache from spending a night coiled into himself, unmoving. Roe shuts his eyes and waits to come back into himself. He barely remembers dreaming, just the feeling of it, specific shapes and colors that had horrified him unforthcoming when he tries to recall them. They always seem so inconsequential in the light, transitory as lines drawn in water, when in the night before he'd thought them indelible. Now, he just feels poorly rested.

Shelton's side of the mattress is cold. The sheet Roe had thrown over him is folded into a neat military square. Roe glances across the room to the corner by the door; Shelton's shoes are gone too. Not that there would've been many places for him to hide; Roe's apartment is the size of a closed fist. He's not sorry to see him gone; there's a relief to just being Eugene Roe again, just him and his closed door, his private life. Shelton's interruption of that mundanity had been an interjection of excitement that Roe hadn't asked for, an uninvited regress into his past.

But still, for all it was worth, Roe is sorry he didn't get to say goodbye.

His watch is on the bedside table where he'd left it (it occurs to Roe, uneasily, that Shelton could have taken the opportunity to rob him blind, but hadn't) and he squints at its face, trying to divine the time in the morning glare. Six-thirteen in the a.m. His shift doesn't start til eight.

Roe peels himself out of bed and goes to perform his morning ablutions. His head throbs a bit as he dunks it under the shower; his scalp stings and his eyes are dry. He rubs soap into his hair gingerly. No blood, nothing quite so dramatic, but he keeps his motions mechanical and his mind carefully blank. The pipes squeal as the hot water finally kicks in. The spray isn't as strong as he'd like it to be, but it never is. Water slides lukewarm on his skin; he tries to let it take the tension in his shoulders with it.

A wandering thought catches where he doesn't expect, and the question of whether Shelton had left before or after the sun rose floats across his mind. He wonders whether or not he'll have some place to sleep, or if he'll be found huddled on the street again tonight. He wonders if he'll know how to clean his stitches, or if he'll even bother, or rather leave them to fester. Roe is struck by a sudden image: Shelton's face, drawn and pale and slack from sepsis. He shakes it violently from his mind.

Coffee, he thinks. He'll feel better after a good dose of coffee.

The sky is intermittently overcast and thick with rolling clouds as Roe steps out onto the street. His toolbox rattles at his side. The air hangs heavy with humidity and dampness slicks the surface of every wall, makes the pavement shine like glass. Whatever early morning rain has passed for now; Roe hopes that it won't return. No construction in the rain, and he'd prefer the money.

The storefronts huddled close to the main street are beginning to stir. Proper shops won't be open for another hour yet, but Roe stops by the food stall on the corner and pays eight cents for a cup of thin black coffee. He drinks down the first mouthful, bitterness twisting his face, but heat crawls up his spine, settling into the base of his skull, and that's enough. "It's just a penny for milk and sugar," the proprietor reminds him.

Roe grimaces. He finishes his coffee with long swallows that pass tastelessly over his tongue. "Lemme get one of those sandwiches," he says instead.

"Egg?"

"If you have it." He crushes up the paper cup and tosses it into the bin.

"Thirty cents."

Roe counts out his change, exchanges it for a wax paper bundle. "Thanks, Darius," he says.

Darius waves. "See you tomorrow, Gene."

There are four blocks to the streetcar stop; he walks them with his lunch beneath his arm and his eyes counting his steps. The streets have started to fill: guys heading down to the warf, guys headed for the factories, the docks, the lumberyards.

"Buy a pape, mister?"

A newsie jolts Roe from his stupor. He looks up to find a newspaper shoved beneath his nose. The boy looks up at him with blank, dispassionate eyes. He can't be older than twelve. "Yeah," Roe responds reflexively. He sets down his box and digs into his pocket again. "Yeah, sure."

 _First successful Soviet atomic test_ , Roe reads, squinting at the words against the jostle of the streetcar. The door opens at a stop and new passengers crowd on. Roe folds the newspaper into another half. _Details on Blast in USSR Not Revealed_

It takes him a very long time just to read the front page. He doesn't always know all the words. Sometimes, by the time he's gotten to the end of a sentence, he's forgotten how it began and has to start over. The ride downtown takes half an hour, and he tries to read most days when he can, biting his lips down tighter over his cigarette to keep from mouthing the words to himself. Most of the other guys just stand. Some guys stare out the cloudy windows. Only a couple ever talk, and it's in slurring, adenoidal accents different from his.

Roe reads, but it's mostly pointless; he doubts he's getting any better.

When he arrives, he's the first one on site. The foreman is late, so Roe takes a seat on the steps of the temp office and smokes. Mothers go by with their children, schoolkids roam their way to school, men in dark suits and expensive hats cover their mouths with linen as they hurry past.

Roe's cigarette is burned down nearly to his lips when the foreman finally shows. He stands, beats off the seat of his pants and dropping the butt of his smoke beneath his heel. "Mr. Hubert," he greets.

Hubert frowns, wiping sweat from his lip with a off-white kerchief. "Roe," he says. "You're early."

"No, sir," Roe replies, but ducks his eyes down deferentially.

Hubert harrumphs, jowls wobbling as he shakes his wristwatch free of his sleeve. "You're not supposed to be here til eight -- Oh," he realizes. It's 8:17. He frowns harder. "Then where's everyone else?"

Roe shakes his head. "Can I punch in now, sir?"

Hubert grumbles irritably, "No-good, do-nothing sonsabitch--" He unhooks the office keys from his belt loop and unlocks the door.

"At least you ex-military boys know something about discipline," Hubert remarks as Roe pulls the lever on his timecard. "You ask me, what this country needs is another war. Learn these kids something about being men."

Roe nods, gaze still cast aside. "Sir," he says and heads out.

The other men filter in in twos and threes. They nod their acknowledgements at one another, mutters and smokes passing around like a bout of the common cold. A couple more minutes of hemming and hawing, and the bullshit starts.

"Hey Wade, you coming out with us again for lunch?" someone asks.

"Yeah, sure," Wade answers. "You going to the place around the corner?"

"You know, Wade, you don't have to prove anything to us. We can always visit the sausage bar."

"What sausage bar?"

Laughter.

Wade frowns. "Anyway, I like the corner place. They have good meatloaf."

"Yeah, _meat_ loaf."

"Shut up, Reginald."

"Wade just wants to check out that waitress some more. What's her name? Vinnie, you remember. Cara? Carol?"

"Carla?" Vinnie scratches at his face with the bend of his arm. "Man, don't ask me, Wade's the one making eyes at her."

"Shut up, you fucks," Wade whines.

"Wade don't remember. Wade just remember her tits."

"You jealous of her tits, Wade?"

"Guys, I said shut up."

"Gene," Reginald calls. Wade throws a piece of scrap wood at him. He ducks it, cackling. "Gene, you remember, right? Big girl, wore her blouse real open. Come on, you're good this shit."

Roe nails down another board. "Caroline," he tells them. "She's a nice girl," he adds, but no one listens

"Caroline!" Vinnie crows, slapping his knee. "Sweet Caroline!"

Reginald chucks the chunk of wood back. "Shit, Wade," he says. "Maybe you should just let Gene have her. Let her have a real man."

Wade scowls and curses. "You guys are the fucking worst. See if I ever spot for you again. Go on, keep going, keep making fun."

"Aww, princess, don't be like that."

The guys leave him to his own devices thirty minutes before noon; he waves them off, perched on the skeleton of a half-framed balcony. The temperature rises with the day, sunlight burning above the brim of his hardhat, and the rest of Roe's day passes without incident or inquiry. He lifts, he measures, he builds. Wood passes beneath his hands, cedar, pine, fir: they do not give, they do not break. They stay where he puts them as long as he knows how to place them. It's creation of the basest sort, and he has some assurance that if he takes his time, takes his care, that this will last.

He heads home that evening tired as always, a bit hollow, like his insides have been scraped clean. It's not an entirely unpleasant place to be. The sun goes down in an orange blaze and takes the heat and haze with it. He passes quiet alleyway after quiet alleyway and formulates no opinion about their vacancy one way or another.

By the time he reaches his building he's swaying on his feet. It's an exhaustion that's as much about the empty room he's going home to as it is the soreness of his arms and back. Day off tomorrow; he expects he'll have himself a drink tonight, try to sleep in tomorrow morning. He's upstairs by the time he remembers he's out of booze, but it's a dull realization worth neither antipathy nor disappointment.

What Roe doesn't expect is the package he finds crammed underneath his door when he gets to it. It's a brown paper bag, crumpled and stained with what looks like food grease. It looks like it's come out of a trash bin. He unwedges it so that it doesn't drag into his room when he opens the door and rummages out the contents so that he can toss the packaging. It's a spongy thing, whatever it is, wrapped in more paper.

The inside of his apartment is lit only by the lingering twilight as Roe toes off his shoes, drops his tools into the corner by the door. The heat of the day is still caught within the air. Roe turns on the ceiling fan and props open a window to let it dissipate. Then he turns on a light.

"Dear Doc," a scrap of lined paper pinned to the package reads, scrawled in dull-tipped pencil. "Gaws", crossed out, then "Gawz" crossed out more furiously. The note's run out of space, so Roe follows the arrow that directs him to flip the page. "Poor voo," it says, followed by a mess of a signature that Roe supposes is read "M. Shelton."

The weight of Roe's shoulders lightens for no reason in particular. He tears open the paper. Gauze, he sees, his mouth turning up on its own accord. It's gauze. He's got no clue how to spell it either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bonus material: [Galline, Galo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz_14MwZt9U&feature=player_detailpage#t=34)
> 
> "In Creole, "ga line" = (re)garde la lune = look at the moon. "ga lo" = (re)garde l'eau = look at the water."  
> \-- some comment on YouTube


	4. Chapter 4

"Hey Wade, think fast." There's a hollow clatter and a viscous splattering sound, like a pail being dropped from a height. Roe looks over just in time to see an empty tin roll across the floor, still dribbling.

Wade jumps to his feet in a much-belated dodge, his skinny arms flying out. "Aw goddamnit, Reg," he grouses, palms outstretched away from his body. "You got paste all over my trousers." He bats stickily at the splotch on his thigh, fingers bending.

Reginald snickers. "Aww gee wizz princess, I'm sorry," he whines, lisping on his consonants. "Did I get your new dress all dirty?"

"It's not a—"

"None of the boys will ever ask you to the gala ball now, princess," Vinnie adds.

"Guys—"

"Better luck next year, princess," Reginald cackles and Vinne joins in, balling fists under his eyes like he's crying. They bump into each other as they gather their kits, stretching their bones. Roe keeps his eyes down, his expression carefully blank even as he feels his brows lowering into furrows.

"Did you see him?" Reginald asks, and flings his arms about melodramatically, squealing. 

"Yeah, and then he was like--" Vinnie screeches, "Not my trousers!" They saunter out into the next room, half-used paste cans swinging at their sides, still snickering. 

"Real funny, guys," Wade calls after them. His voice pitches. "You're a real fuckin' laugh, you know?" When it's clear neither of them are coming back, he sighs, disgusted, and tries to fish a kerchief out of his pocket while touching as little of himself as possible. "Goddamnit," he repeats, wiping at the paste, making strings between his fingers.

Roe pauses from the section of hardwood he's supposed to be installing and watches as Wade ineffectually cleans himself up and goes back to work. Then he stands up and goes over to him.

"Hey," he says quietly. Wade looks up at him with wide, wary eyes. Roe lowers his voice further. "You want some help with that?"

Wade's face relaxes til the lines smooth out, and he smiles amenably. "Yeah, thanks Gene."

Roe shrugs and kneels down next to him. Wade's stack of pine is considerably larger than his, but then, Wade hasn't been at it as long as Roe has, and he hasn't nearly the practice. 

"Here," Roe suggests, pulling one of the boards toward him. "I'll lay, you hammer. It'll be faster."

Afternoon sunlight pours in through the kitchen windows, heating the half-finished room, and sending the stink of new wood and wood glue into the air. Roe's shirt catches on his shoulders, fanning over his back as he stretches and retracts his arms. 

Wade pants, bent at the waist rather than the knees. Roe glances at him; he really hasn't been doing this long. "Don't worry," he reassures, watching his needless struggle. "They'll warm up to you. You're just new is all."

"I ain't worried. I got this," Wade blurts. He wipes his face with the back of a wrist. Sweat tracks into his eyes anyway, and he blinks hard.

Roe nods mollifyingly. "Yeah," he agrees, "you got this," and puts his head back down.

Wade lets out a discontented noise but stays quiet. For a couple minutes, Roe thinks he might just let the whole thing drop, but then he bursts spitefully, "Besides, it's not like they like you either."

"That's true." Roe doesn't look back up at him. He's not sure why he even got into it with this kid. He doesn't want to get to know him; he has no interest in his troubles or his story. It's none of his business. He's got to learn that none of it's any of his business. 

Wade knocks the next six nails into place in a loud, angry strikes. Roe wants to tell him to cool it or he'll dent the wood. Finally, he says, sighing, "Sorry, I just--" 

It's the beginning of a muttered confession that Roe doesn't want to hear. He bites the inside of his mouth as Wade plows on, oblivious, "I know I've only been on this job for a couple of months. I only came down cos the rubber factory at Lake Charles closed down. It's not like I know anyone down here. All my family's up north. I just thought it'd be easier to find work in the city." He pauses for a moment to hammer down a board before picking up where he left off:

"And I know I'm not the, you know," he gestures at himself – skinny body, knobby wrists, voice that lilts into a girlish timbre – "type of guy you'd expect to see in this sort of job, but it's just like." He sighs again, lowering himself down, settling onto the floor like an Indian. Roe stops working and looks up in slow incredulity. Wade just looks wistful.

He says, with a certain glittering in his eyes, "It's not like I don't try, you know?"

"Okay." Roe puts a board down. Wade doesn't respond.

"I'm friendly, but I stand up for myself," he says. "I mean, I give as good as I get, right?"

Roe places another board more noisily. Wade doesn't even flutter from his pointless introspection. "Sure," he says stiffly. He grabs Wade's discarded mallet and starts nailing things down himself.

Wade comes out of his reverie at that, apologizes with a duck of his head, and goes back to work. They finish the room in reasonable time as the day ends. Roe sits back against a wall, watching as Wade tidies up the last of the wood and a couple boxes of leftover nails. He takes a drink of slightly gritty water out of a canteen and offers it wordlessly over to Wade when he finishes up, who takes it with a murmured thanks. 

Vinnie's braying laugh sounds out from outside as he's drinking; water spills from the corner of Wade's mouth. He grimaces as he hands the bottle back. Roe recaps it perfunctorily as Wade toes at the floor and doesn't go to collect his things.

"I don't know what I'm doing here," Wade admits, his voice paltry and little. "I obviously don't belong."

Roe feels his eyes thin, his brows lower, his lips curl up over his teeth before he has a chance to reconsider. He sneers with venom he hardly recognizes: "Why don't you go home?" 

Wade winces and somehow gets even smaller. "Yeah," he says. He jitters and twitches and shrinks into his shoulders as he turns to go.

A hard ball of guilt pulls at Roe's gut but doesn't quite absolve his contempt. It's easy to be cruel to Wade. He's easy to hurt and he doesn't help himself, going about like he does with every soft bruise and belly exposed to the world. He has no barricades, no artifice. He's a kid. He doesn't deserve Roe's spite, or anyone else's.

Roe leans back and tries to muster some shadow of sympathy for the kid and his misplaced pity, tries to care but comes up short. He's tired, and Wade, sniffling like a kicked puppy and angling for kindness, isn't something he's prepared to shoulder. But Wade doesn't have any friends. From what he's told him, he doesn't have anyone.

"Hey," he says. Wade turns his face. His nose is pink. Roe sighs. "You doing anything after?" He climbs to his feet, one popping knee at a time. Wade looks at him, gives him a puzzled look that bridges into hopeful. Roe ignores it. "You want dinner?" 

Wade blinks. Grins. Relief lights up his face. 

Roe lifts a lip at him in response. He's careful not to give him a full smile.

 

Roe drags out clearing up til long after Reginald and Vinnie clock out for the day. It's not that he minds being seen leaving with Wade, but it's not something he wants to answer for. He's spent a lot of deliberate effort shrouding himself in careful, inscrutable non-participation. Roe knows he leans more upon their assumptions about his silence than he ought to, but it keeps him distant, cold, unrelatable. Those are things he prefers to be, in their company.

He lets Wade pick their destination. He chooses the corner diner of course. 

Wade's been running his mouth non-stop ever since Roe offered to eat with him. 

"--and that's when Cousin Joey said, 'It ain't like she's gonna miss it!' and then he _ran_. Like Satan himself was after him." Wade laughs like a horse at his own anecdote, and Roe offers him a chuckle to be polite. He's not in the best state of mind for this kind of act, still a bit caught within himself from a day of going on automatic. Wade picks up on it, coughs, and offers a bit haphazardly, "It was funnier if you'd seen it. Uncle Jeremiah's face was purple."

"No, it's funny," Roe assures him, though it's weak even to his own ears. Wade nods, tries for a smile, but it wobbles off his face like a newborn calf. 

Roe bites his lip and winces. "Sorry," he says, not quite managing cheer but hitting genial quite solidly, "I ain't quite all there. Must be tired."

Wade brightens a bit. "You're probably hungry," he guesses. "We're almost there. Chef Rollo's. You've been here before, right, Gene?"

A sign with an image of a soup bowl swings by the front window, the words _A Family Restaurant_ printed underneath in faded green paint. Roe had gone with Wade and the other guys once and hadn't been back since. He has little recollection of the experience, other than that Vinnie ate like his plate was a trough and Reginald was an embarrassment to be within closed quarters with.

Inside, the diner is dimly lit, half-empty but still cramped. Roe has to duck a hanging decorative flag of some sort. Wade walks straight under, unfazed, but at his full height, he's is hardly up to Roe's chin.

But Wade's not paying attention to that. He glances nervously back at Roe once, and then he fixes his eyes on a woman in a blue dress behind the service counter. "Let's sit at the counter," he says loudly, waving Roe after him. "There's Caroline. Hi, Caroline." Even in profile, Roe can see how his smile takes all the shallow angles out of his round face.

"Hi, Wade," Caroline says. Roe remembers her better up close. She'd brought Wade a new drink after Vinnie had spilled his first one onto the floor, been sweet about it, even with the mess. She looks more tired today, hair bedraggled and lines clearly visible around her mouth. "How are you this evening?"

"I'm excellent today, Caroline. How about you?" Wade keeps smiling, his teeth gleaming crookedly. He slides into the seat and leans forward showily on one fist.

"Great," she replies. Glances at Roe. "Got a new friend today?" she asks warily. There's a twang to her vowels.

Wade swivels around with an air as if he's just been reminded Roe is here. "Oh," he says. "Yeah. This is Gene." He claps Roe on the back and grins, pleased. "Gene, this is Miss Caroline. I think you've met, right?"

Roe nods. "Miss," he murmurs. Caroline moves her mouth at him anonymously, eyes passing over him without recognition. He makes a neutral expression back then picks a menu from the stand. 

A strain of music trickles out of the kitchen as the door swings open. Caroline brings a them chipped mugs of coffee and takes their food orders to the kitchen. Another waitress ducks out with plates and heads over to the back corner where three older guys from one of the other build sites sit, slouched over half-finished beers. 

People start filtering in, mostly working guys, a couple. "Caroline, table two," says the other waitress, jerking her head. Caroline nods, her hands clinking quickly amongst the silverware. Wade keeps on, unaware, "—But I really don't like red foods, you know? Except beets, beets are good. I mean, I don't have anything against the color red, I mean, like, I like your hair –" 

"Wade," Roe says lowly. He lets his coffee mug muffle the admonishment in his voice. "Let's let the lady get back to work, huh?"

Wade blinks, unseeing. Then he grins. "Oh, yeah." His hand goes over the top of his towhead. "Sorry about that Caroline. You know how I get. It's just nice to see you."

Caroline smiles tightly. "I'll be back with your food," she says, grabbing a handful of menus and paper-wrapped forks. Her eyes catch Roe's, and he thinks he sees a flicker of acknowledgement in the split second before she's off. She calls to Wade over her shoulder, "It's nice to see you, too, sweetie."

Wade's eyes go with her. He sighs, "She's something isn't she?" He puts his chin in one hand against the counter, the picture of boyish longing. 

Roe folds and refolds a napkin. "She's a nice girl," he allows without any real opinion on the matter. Girls like Caroline walked down every street in New Orleans with their star-bright eyes and accents from Kansas or Tennessee or Alabama, the lustre slowly fading from their faces with every magic-less day in this supposed city of magic. She's unremarkable. Normal.

Wade's picked a girl no one would question for his would-be sweetheart. Roe wonders if he'd done that on purpose or out of convenience.

"Yeah," Wade ponders. He stirs sugar into his cup without drinking from it. Roe eyes the steady, unbroken stream and takes another sip of his coffee. "Hey," Wade hedges after a moment. "Do you suppose she'd go out with a guy like me?" He fidgets with the milk jug before decanting it, too, into his cup. "You know, if I asked her?"

Roe shrugs. "Sure. Why not?"

"She's just so, you know --" Wade makes an noise in the back of his throat. Roe picks at a crack in his mug, waiting for Wade to supply his own words. "--everything," he settles on incoherently. He waves an encompassing hand. "Pretty, nice. You know she wants to be a jazz singer?"

"You don't say."

"Yeah, she's not from around here either. Came down from up north. Kentucky or some place."

Roe closes his eyes and counts to ten, comes back out with strained smile and an amount of forgiveness for how hard the kid is trying, how badly he wants to convince. "Sounds like you've really gotten to know her," he says, his jaw not quite unlocking.

Wade goes on, unaware, "And I know Reg and Vinnie would really get off my back if I had a girl, I just know it."

Roe sighs. He leans his elbows forward onto the counter. He doesn't have the wisdom he ought to have for a kid in Wade's difficulty: words of forbearance, of guidance -- any words at all. He ought to have answers to the questions Wade poses without asking. Some platitude, some assurance. He doesn't though, nothing worth more than the breath that it would waste. He has hardly assurance for himself. 

Perhaps if Wade were more than a boy smearing at his face with normalcy. Perhaps if he had some insight into the reasons why he stares after Vinnie, mewls after Reg, trails around after Roe himself like a lost goddamn puppy. Perhaps then they might've had some piece to talk about. As it is though, Roe's heart stays where it is in his chest, but his lips thin in recognition, if little else. 

He tells Wade, pushing his tone down low enough that his ambivalence sounds like sincerity, "Those guys are jerks, Wade." Wade startles at the sound of his own name. His nervous eyes jump from the vague middle-distance to Roe's face, searching. Roe doesn't meet him. He's provided enough. "You shouldn't let them tell you what to do."

"I don't," Wade blurts, but his skittering fingers give him away, reaching for his napkin and shredding it into ribbons. 

Roe keeps his gaze aside; he has no desire to meet Wade's panicked eyes. He presses on, steadily, "Don't do anything you don't want to."

"I'm not," Wade protests, a note of indignation heating his voice, raising his tone. 

Roe looks away while Wade makes a whimper in distress and he follows his fingers as they stumble over the linoleum and fitfully shred another napkin. He raises his gaze finally to find Wade's face a splotchy mess of blushes and sweat. Roe grimaces, instinctively repelled, but manages to prop it into a smile. It sits even and clean on his face when he offers it to Wade, a gesture of understanding to make up for the acceptance he can't give. Wade blushes harder, and he sets to look away, but then his features freeze. The set of his eyes changes, and Roe hastens to regather all his expressions like a henwife chasing hens. 

Wade regards Roe with a squinting heedfulness he had never before afforded him. "I like her, Gene," he says slowly, distrustfully . "Honestly, I really do."

Roe keeps his face blank, uninvolved. Unthreatening. "Good. That's good," he says. "She's a good-looking girl. You've got good taste."

He drinks his coffee down in hard swallows to pull his pulse down from his throat. There's nothing to that skewed look on Wade's face, Roe tells himself. Wade isn't that perceptive. Wade's a dumb kid, a sheltered country boy who can't even recognize the demons in himself. There's no way he sees anything into Roe's. There's no way he'd even know what he was looking at. 

That's just annoyance twisting Wade's features, making him look at Roe all sideways and strange. He's just sullen, not suspicious. 

Wade finally looks away, and Roe lets himself breathe again. "I'm gonna do it," he says, back to normal, but with a note of uncharacteristic steel bolstering his usually dewy voice. "I'm gonna ask her out."

Roe puts his cup down with perfectly steady hands. "Okay." 

In the kitchen, the cook calls their order, slams his palm down on a bell a couple of times, and shouts for Caroline for good measure. Caroline weaves her way over from between the tables, a coffee pot in each hand.

Wade snaps to attention. He sits up and fidgets with his shirt, runs his hands over his hair like he might flatten his flat hair down even further. "Goddamnit," he mutters, rubbing his fingerstips together. "My palms are all sweaty."

Roe smiles at him the even smile he reserves for discomfort just like this. "That's all right," he says. "It's not like you have to do this today."

Wade snorts through his nose. "Not today? Not today?" he demands. "Look at her, Gene!" He squeaks as his voice hits a false note and the table sitting behind them turn to look. Face bursting into color, he lowers his voice and mutters urgently, "You think she's the kind of girl who's not gonna have a fella by tomorrow? Two, if she wanted?"

"You sure she hasn't got one now?" Roe replies reasonably.

Wade's brows furrow. "Yes," he say definitely, and then immediately amends, "I mean." He chews on his upper lip. Roe can see him thinking furiously. "Yes," he decides, though he sounds less than certain. "She's never talked about anyone. I think," he demurs. "I mean, I kind of asked before and she didn't say anything."

"Well, I guess you'll find out."

Caroline reappears from the kitchen, plates in hand. Roe watches her cross the floor til he could almost see the whites of her eyes. 

Then Wade twitches. "I don't know how to do this," he hisses. Roe looks over his shoulder at him. Wade's knee bounces. His fingers drum. His face is so red his hair looks almost white against it. He babbles distractedly, "How do I do this? Gene you've done this before, right? How did you do this?" "I mean," he says, and it's innocent enough it nearly doesn't sound like a test: "You've got a girl, right?"

Roe shows his teeth. "Yeah," he says, as easy as breathing. "Don't be ridiculous. Of course I do."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~~Next chapter presently. I know we all miss our Snafu.~~ Change of plans, Snafu to be back chapter 6.  cries of disappointment from the peanut gallery


	5. Chapter 5

Roe props his groceries up against his door with his knee and fumbles for his housekeys. Not in his front pocket, not in the shirt. Back. He hooks his fingers around them. Always the last place he looks. 

He takes a hand off the bag to unlock his door, but manages only to unbalance his shopping and drop his keys. He curses, "Damn," muttered under his breath. 

Roe bends; his groceries tilt. He scrambles to readjust, but it's all a day late and a dollar short. The bag tears. Tinned soup topples and scatters onto the floor. A bread loaf flops out sadly. He's left with a sachet of oranges in one hand and a corner of brown paper bag in the other.

"Damnit, damnit, goddamnit." He crumples the paper and sends it sailing over the rail with disgust; picks up his keys, jamming them into the lock. 

The long summer evening still brings a glow through his half-drawn blinds, but he gropes for the wall switch anyway. A fluorescent buzz ignites the quiet and fills his threadbare rooms with flat yellow light. Immediately, the gnats rush in from the outside and begin to circle. Roe curses them too and wedges the door open with his other pair of shoes. 

Distractedly, he drops the oranges on the table and tosses the paper into the sink next to his dishes from the night before. One of the oranges tries to escape while his back is turned. It rolls to the edge of the table and tips over the edge, but Roe swivels in time and snatches it up before it falls. He sets it back on top of the others in a sort of lopsided fruit pyramid. "Stay," he mutters, and, after giving the whole mess another affixing glare, trudges out to pick up the rest of his stuff. 

Head down, herding down the cream of tomatoes and stacking up the chicken noodles before they roll under the railing, he hears the sound of hinges creaking. He looks over. Leaning over the balcony from the second floor below, two pale little faces peer up at him from downstairs.

"Hello, Donovan, Deena," Roe says, faint. He raises his fingers in the beginning of a wave, but the kids ducks back into their apartment before all the syllables have fully left his mouth. 

"Maaaa," Roe hears instead, alongside the thud of tiny feet. "Ma, it's Mr. Gene."

Roe hurriedly shovels boxes and cans in from the doorway and stands just in time to see their mother put her head over the rail. "Gene," Ellie calls, and waves out toward him, a sheaf of paper in her hand. She turns and shoos her children back inside with a muttered word and disappears from sight. Roe can hear her footsteps fading down the walkway and then padding up the creaking stairs. 

"Gene," she says again, appearing on the landing. She's dressed in blue under a stained, floral apron, and her hands are red and cracked. She brings with her the smell of washing soap and home cooking.

Roe smiles with a quick hook of his mouth. "Good evening, ma'am." He tugs surreptitiously at his door and kicks a box of corn flakes out of the way so that he can at least pull it shut. 

Ellie smiles. She's a hard woman, built of lines and angles and stern expressions, but when she smiles, her face rounds and she looks almost young: older than he is, but not old enough to have earned the deep brackets around her mouth. Today though, in the feeble light of the day's remains, she looks tired, frayed around the edges. 

"There you are," she says, stepping to a stop in front of him. "I've been trying to get hold of you since Wednesday." She holds out the bundle in her hand. They're envelopes. "The mailman put these in the wrong box, I don't know how he keeps getting us mixed up," she says. She crosses her arms and her eyes stay on Roe's fingers as he absently shuffles through the pile. There's a harassed air about her, as if there's somewhere she dearly needs to be. Roe straightens and gives her an acquitting smile. She doesn't leave. 

It's not unusual that Ellie comes by to talk. There's usually something to talk about: the neighbours, the heat, Mrs Duchamp's incontinent tomcat. So Roe nods, watching her closely. "Must be our remarkable resemblance," he intones, and she laughs, her chin ducked, but her eyes stay dark and hard. 

The Bassinis were already here when he moved into the place six months ago. They'd come from up north somewhere; some place in Pennsylvania, and then New York before that. It'd been difficult to stay fuzzy on the details; the walls that keep their lives apart were paper thin. Roe has heard the scoldings and songs, the children screaming with laughter and the mister and missus screaming at each other; some more than others, some more recently than others. Sam came back from his truck route last night; Roe had heard him through the floorboards, muttering and cursing, Ellie's voice tightly patient as she spoke to him. 

There'd been no shouting last night, at least. No shouting and no crying. "How are you?" he asks, friendly and light because they both pretend he doesn't know. 

"Fine," she says. Her lips thin together in an upwards direction, but her arms uncross and she waves off his concern with a flapping palm. "The kids are going back to school in a couple of weeks," she tells him particularly. "Donovan's starting the first grade, you know."

Roe bobs his head agreeably and lets her continue, "They want to move Dee up a year early, on account of her scores, but I don't know," she trails off, and makes a frustrated sound. "The older kids might pick on her."

"Deena's a smart girl," Roe remarks, batting distractedly at the mosquitoes buzzing his ear.

Ellie's expression is rueful but fond. "She is," she says. "They learn awful quick at that age, you know what she said to me the other day? She said, 'Mama, this baloney is atrocious'. I don't know where she could've heard that... " she trails off and blinks suddenly, and her brows go quizzical. "Is that a--" she says, and looks over Roe's shoulder.

Roe followers her gaze. Slumped limply against the railing, Roe's battered loaf of white bread looks like an indecisive suicide teetering before the leap. "Oh." He snatches it up. "Er."

The lines on Ellie's face break open like floodgates. This time, when she smiles, the light goes on behind her voice. "Have you been fighting with your food?" she asks.

Roe shakes his head, grinning sheepishly. "Not on the regular, no ma'am."

She laughs. It's a brief, abrupt sound, but genuine. She looks him in the eye. "So how have you been?" she asks him, amiably enough, though her eyes insist. She folds her arms over her waist and peers up at him in a way that suggests she'll know if he tries to con her. Roe's shifts on his feet. He's known COs less effective at inspiring cooperation.

But Roe ducks his head in an easy gesture. "Just fine, ma'am," he says and makes an absent grasp towards the door. Ellie's eyebrows peak into sceptical chevrons. 

"Gene," she says from the bottom of her voice, and Roe pauses. She looks down at the papers in his hand. Roe's eyes follow hers artlessly, but it's when he glances upon the multicoloured edge of a postcard that his honest smile goes false. He closes his fingers. "Really."

Roe clears his throat like a shrug, but she doesn't look away, so he does, obscurely, with a gaze that drifts. They're not friends; that wouldn't be seemly, but Ellie is blind to his fictions when she doesn't need to be. Perhaps it's why Roe tries to do her the same courtesies.

Ellie sighs. She pulls at a frayed string on her sleeve and advises him carefully, "I'm sure you don't need telling, but you take care of yourself, all right?" without a suggestion of blame or culpability to her tone. Roe nods, his expression studiously ignorant. 

"Thanks," he says, and then, when Ellie looks up, clarifies, "for the mail, I mean."

She inclines her head. Studies him a moment longer. "Good evening, then, Mr Roe," she says finally.

Roe reaches for his door. "Good night, ma'am," he says, and he waits until her footsteps have returned down the stairs before he goes into his room.

Tidying first, of course, he tells himself. He puts the packet onto the kitchen table and goes about straightening out the place. The cans go into the cupboard, the bread into the bread box, the crooked carton of milk into the refrigerator next to the sachet of oranges. If he takes his time making sure the soup labels are aligned, if he stops to put on the kettle, if he takes a detour to the bedroom to gather up a load of laundry, it is only because he's put them off; these are things that needed to be done. If his every second glance finds itself stealing toward the kitchen table, it is only because his eyes are drawn to the light.

If his pulse feels light and his fingers feel greedy-- well, he can find some excuse.

He plucks up an envelope while he picks through a sandwich, sitting in his one chair, staring across the table. He regards the numbers and notices with serious and appropriate diligence. After ten minutes, he determines that it might be a water bill. The next is a notice from the local candidate for city secretary. There's an advert for the Sears catalogue. By the time he finishes staring at that, his dinner down to its dregs and his coffee's long gone cold. 

There's more he could be doing: the hot water tap's been making noises, and the floors haven't had a good sweeping in ages now. It's getting rather late, actually; he could start settling in, getting ready for bed. It's just a postcard. What's it matter if he picks it up tonight, or tomorrow night, or sometime next week? What's the difference of another night, when it's been four months since the last one, six months since the one before that? 

Roe doesn't look as he reaches over and props it up against the salt shaker, picks up his dishes and goes to put them in the sink. He does the washing up with his sleeves pushed up over his elbows and the rough feeling of textured cardstock between his fingers. Scornfully, he sucks in his stomach and hisses his next breath through gritted teeth. Then he dries off his hands.

It's just a postcard, and not even a very nice one. The front of it is splashed with the pink and yellow of a budget sunset and a godawful illustration of a Bavarian milkmaid. There is a line of excitable German etched across it in block, seriffed letters. 

The back is equally unremarkable. Just a return address to an army base in Berlin and and three lines of backslanted script. It doesn't take even him very long to read. 

There is a moment when Roe feels the life of him go still in the way he holds himself, leant forwards on his elbows, one foot hooked around the leg of the chair. The city goes on around him – the grind of tyres on the street, the ringing streetcars – the faint strain of a record, scratching from one of the apartments below. But Roe ceases to exist except for in the loop of a lower case 'g', the cramped eye of an 'e', the way the ink blots before the steady "yours" leads into a scrawled signature.

A moment passes and Roe exhales into his palm. He presses his hand more firmly against the inadvisable tugging at his mouth and swallows around the sudden conspicuousness of his heartbeat in his throat. There is a guttering ache beneath his sternum, something that twists at him, bone deep. Standing, he puts the card down, turns it over, fingers lingering. He sits back down.

They have words for this. Names for men who sit in their homes, holding their breaths, wishing that paper could carry scent across oceans, that words could deliver the precise curvature of a smile. 

"Peculiar" would be charitable. "Soft" would be less. They only get worse from there. Roe doesn't want to dwell on worse. He doesn't want to dwell. He doesn't want to see it as his life slowly turns to rust around him. 

It's just a card, just paper, but he turns it between his fingers and his eyes feel heavy, his skin feels worn. Gently, gingerly, he plucks up the card by its edge and takes it with him into the bedroom.

There is a stack of postcards there, all German, all postmarked within the past five years. He keeps them in the top drawer of his dresser, one of the empty ones, where the rest of his possessions do not occupy enough space to inhabit. They are not hidden, but he does not look at them. He doesn't need to; there are only eighteen of them, in total, ugly and brief to the last. They say nothing, reveal nothing, and they do nothing to feed his starving heart, but he keeps them. 

Roe is not a collector. He has little in the way of interest or need in tabulating the things that have happened to him, in accumulating things that share his history or past. He has made an existence of forgetting. He's perfected the act of putting himself aside. 

But he keeps the postcards – thoughtlessly, foolhardily – as if they are pieces of the man who sends them that he can one day stitch together, and not just squares of coloured paper. 

He does not read them now as he adds another to their rank, and he closes the drawer with a firm and steady hand. He doesn't think. He doesn't dwell. He goes on with his night.

The matches are on the kitchen table, smokes in his shirt pocket. He fetches them and he takes himself outside.

There is a vibration set beneath his skin, still, that hasn't lessened or quieted down. A siren wails past the street corner; a dog barks; a drunk curses unintelligibly at another drunk. Roe sits against the rails with his legs bent in front of him and drinks smoke into his lungs. 

He'll have to stop by the bank tomorrow, he enumerates with deliberate care. Rent is due by the end of the month and he's low on cash after the grocery run today. He should probably see about getting his boots re-soled, since he'll be down that way anyway. That's assuming Mr Orson remembers him from the last time enough to cut him the same deal. He doesn't want to renegotiate a new price. It always makes him feel guilty. 

He does not lack in concerns to make up his present, meaningless minutia that tie him to the life he has now: little worries, daily disquiets, prosaic reminders of what he is, of who and where. They weigh in the front of his mind like ballasts in a breeze, but they're not enough to fill his thoughts, to keep them from drifting.

Roe shudders as if stung by a sudden cold, though it is still the heart of summer, and the New Orleans heat is damp as a hot breath. Roe hasn't felt cold in five years. But he shudders, and his shoulders hunch, and his heart feels bitten, as if it bleeds.

He has forgotten. He has to have forgotten because it's been five years. That is enough time to forget; that has been more than enough time to leave things well enough alone. When he closes his eyes in the dark, it should be the neon lights and iron trellises of Canal Street that wait there for him. When he sits, here, alone at his windowsill, there should only be one Eugene Roe who sits there, inhabiting his skin.

There should be no ghost of another man following in his shadow. It shouldn't wait for him in quiet places, hide in the corners of his vision, stare out at him with his own eyes when he sees himself in reflections and mirrors. It shouldn't ask him what has gone wrong with him. It shouldn't want him to explain the restlessness that tears him from sleep night after night. It shouldn't question his empty rooms, his empty drawers, his empty prayers. It shouldn't ask why he hasn't done anything worthwhile, what he's waiting for, or if he isn't waiting, why he doesn't simply live. 

It shouldn't ask him what has happened to him that he seems to have forgotten how to love. 

Roe remembers. Of course he remembers. He can smile and prevaricate and say that he doesn't, but he does. Warmth in the snow. Stolen minutes of stillness, voices murmuring. Leaning into sleep against a shoulder that held and did not give. Wordless consolation. Hands in the dark. There isn't enough time in the history of the world to put between him and the last real time he knew how to be at peace.

He wishes he missed the war. He wishes he were lonely. Odd things to wish for, but they're concrete longings that he can hold himself accountable for. They're real when the actual reality is that there are things he should want and things he shouldn't, and it was the things he shouldn't that he'd wanted so badly he's had to stop wanting anything at all. 

Roe flexes his hands, the joints of his fingers popping when he crushes them together. Abstractly, he drops the fading cigarette and watches it bounce between the grates onto the misty pavement below. He stands; the buzz has subsided to a low hum, like an itch. He sets his shoulders and ducks back inside. He ought to write back. It's the least he can do.

This will be the one, he tells himself. This will be the one where he writes back. They're just words, he tells himself. They can't mean anything, if he doesn't let them. He doesn't have to feel anything, if he doesn't want to. 

In the back of his mind, his own words whine back to him in pitched dishonesty. "You don't have to do anything if you don't want to," he hears himself saying, Wade's comically wide eyes casting blue suspicion over him like a net. And perhaps that makes him a hypocrite, and perhaps that makes him worse than Wade, worse than him and the men like him who chase girls and have wives and families and lead them all on, make as if that is all they want, as if they don't keep a stack of ugly postcards hidden like treasure, like hoarded hope--

It's not that simple. He has things he owes. He has debts.

Roe's not an honest man. He can't be, but he tries. He wants to be.

There's a snapped carpenter pencil in one of the kitchen drawers, Roe thinks. Either that, or it's in the bedroom. He'll need paper too, but the torn white envelopes scattered over his table will do for that. In his head, as he searches, he pulls apart words and phrases like sugar paste. "How are you?" doesn't fit. "I'm fine" doesn't say what he means. "It's been five years," only says the obvious. "I've missed you," says nothing at all.

He needs to say something, say how he is, say what he's been doing, say he's been all right. He has been all right. Despite the low, inconstant sting in his chest and the way he sleeps every night with his back to a wall, he's alive. He's whole. He could be neither. 

The pencil's on the night stand, its tip worn to a nub. Roe has to hold it at an angle for it to mark the paper. Sitting himself down at the table again, he shakes out his wrists and smooths a hand down the page, ignoring the shiver of anxiousness that threads through him. It doesn't have to be anything special, he reminds himself. It doesn't have to be real. He'll scratch something out, stop somewhere tomorrow on his way home, buy a proper card, a proper pen, do this right.

He writes, "Dear," as he's been taught, and stops. Strikes it with a line, starts again. 

"Hello," is better, but still strange. It's not right; it's not what fits. 

He writes the next two lines with his tongue between his teeth, his eyes deliberately cast to one side. He has such things he wants to say. They're not words when they leave his mind -- broad swathes of sentiment, sharp prickles of ideas -- but as they filter down into his hand, onto his paper, it's what they become. Ugly. Incomplete. Common.

And perhaps they do have words for this, somewhere beyond his ken. Perhaps in the vast verisimilitude of language, there exists a word that describes the dullness of a memory when held against a real thing, that names the moment after you truly forget the feeling of another person's skin against your own, or the word approximates desire to reach inside yourself and change the parts that make you so that you can finally be somebody else. 

Roe looks down at his trailing, tilting sentences, the crookedness of the letters and reads it back to himself. "Hello," he's written. "How are you. Im fin. Its been 5 yeers. Im sory. Iv mist you," and the bottom of his stomach burns. 

Who does he think-- What does he think he's-- _Stupid._ When he's just-- His hands come up and crush the paper between them, hurls it across the room. The chair scrapes an awful screech when he shoves back from the table; something they'll definitely hear downstairs. He doesn't wonder if Ellie's listening. He turns out the light.

The night is long, but Roe shuts his eyes to it and presses his back more firmly into the wall. Eventually his breathing slows. Eventually, he gets to sleep. Eventually he finds a way to wake in the night and fall back asleep without dreaming.

Just not tonight though. Tonight, he falls back on old words, old habits, and, twisting his scapular between his hands, he'll lie beneath the sticky August heat and wonder if he'll ever learn the word for when a man starts believing in the far worse things he could do with life than to live and be unhappy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> massive fucking apologies for the _six month delay_ between chapters, but frankly, i don't have the emotional literacy, competence, or maturity as a writer to properly execute the degree of complexity that i've dreamed up this story. i don't think i've done roe justice here, and i'm sorry for that. this is a disjointed mess and i'm sure it doesn't even sound remotely human, let alone IC. i wish i could do better, but i'm at the limit of my ability.
> 
> in other news, if any sainted individual out there has the patience for it, i really need a beta.


End file.
